conversely, anecdotage from one-person websites will be used to advance "scientific" arguments...

but dont fuck with Monster Pharm.

Or a demand for more studies before any measures are taken because unprecedented profits are Science! but protecting the health of humans and animals, or at least erring on the side of caution, is woo.

by this point they're trying to turn science into a bad boyfriend

but keep in mind even if the link is real (pesticides and autism), it will still only account for a fraction of all autism.

condition.

If pesticides were a major factor what would we see? Clear patterns of geography where farming communities, and the children of migrant farm workers in particular would be most effected. But here in CA (MIND focuses on the California population in most of their research) we see the opposite: that the highest rates of diagnosis are in the silicon valley and other wealthy professional communities with comparatively little agriculture (and a cultural preference for organic everything.)

Pesticide exposure also doesn't make sense for a condition that's much more common in boys than girls: one would expect roughly equal rates because pregnant women eat the same foods whether they're carrying boys or girls.

MIND has been crank central since it's inception: their past work has involved studying vaccinations as a cause, a link to GI issues (which was part of the Wakefield hypothesis about MMR, that it damaged the bowel and that in turn damaged the brain,) dividing autism up into several different conditions, metal poisoning, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and basically every idea trendy in the alt-med Autism parent community, who raised money to start the thing because they felt the NIH was focusing too much on looking for a genetic cause instead of blaming vaccines as they did.

Or jump on something as being the miracle cure/preventive: Eat broccoli and you'll never get cancer! Stuff like that.

I have two sons with alopecia areata universalis. Alopecia areata is an auto immune disorder that causes hair loss. My sons have the universalis form which is the most extreme: they have no hair anywhere.

Recently there's been something in the news about some man with aa whose hair grew back after taking a medicine for arthritis. Several people have rushed to tell me about this because of my sons. I am highly skeptical that this is really going to be the magic cure as it is one person, AND he had a form of psoriasis which is why he was given the drug in the first place. Furthermore, what are going to be the side effects? Not to mention, alopecia areata is a very weird disease in that someone can be totally bald for years and years, and all of a sudden the air grows back. Experts have no idea why.

Often people who develop alopecia will search for years for the miracle cure, and if after taking a lot of vitamins and their hair comes back, they'll be absolutely convinced it was the vitamins. But taking the vitamins doesn't work for anyone else. And so it goes.

Autism is not a brand new disease. It's possible it's gotten more common for various reasons. It's also possible it's better diagnosed. My oldest son, now 31, has Asperger's. Had he been born a generation earlier, we'd just know he was different from others. Nowadays we have a name for his difference.

And so it goes.

My kid was having allergic reactions to something and was breaking out in hives every few days. We kept casting around for causes and changing soaps and such. In the meantime he came up with his own hypotheses, and at various times decided that the hives were caused by any hand washing at all, his bedroom fan, BART trains (they smell weird and their seats do look gross enough to cause disease) and I can't even remember what else. "I turned the fan on and then I got hives, so the fan causes hives" is perfectly reasonable and perfectly fallacious, but he was *convinced*.

Eventually it turned out that the problem was that the same laundry detergent we had used all of his life had slightly changed their formula. It still took months to convince him that he really should wash his hands regularly and could use his bedroom fan, etc.

On one hand he made connections that seemed reasonable. Unfortunately, it wasn't the right connection. Something as subtle as a formula change in the laundry soap can be very difficult to figure out as the cause of something like hives. Good for you for finally getting it.

Primarily, because a double X chromosome is reinforced, so with more redundancies. The Y has a lot of fragilities because it lacks those redundancies. Also, we now know that there is parity in ADD between the sexes when we thought it was far more Y linked. (Because the primarily female variation tends to be less dramatic and more functional, and gets caught much, much later.) We may not be recognizing spectrum variations in girls because we're doing something differently, or because it displays differently.

Epigenetically, a toxin makes sense (and organophosphates make a lot of sense, since organophosphate poisoning is primarily neurological, though the symptoms are excretory - sweating, tearing, urinating and vomiting) but this dataset doesn't work with currently known epidemiology. Also, there should be a seasonal spike, since 2nd-3rd trimester would mean being pregnant during spraying season (Jan-Feb for winter crops, June-July for summer) and that's not showing.

My bet remains that it has dozens of causes and there's a perfect storm that is happening more often for some reason we can't yet see. But neither vaccines nor wheat has anything to do with it.

Agreed that MIND is a bullshit factory.

There was another study that "linked" vaccines to autism.
Even though the study has been shown to be a fraud, and the "doctor" lost his license, there still are a lot of people who still believe that "Vaccines = autism" nonsense.

Now how valid is this latest study?
I don't know, so I'm not going to pass any judgements on it.

There is *SOME* possibility, but there is also a possibility the study is simply dead wrong.
So I'll wait and see.

BTW, my sister was born when my Dad and Mom tried their hand at farming back in 1965.
And she is *NOT* autistic.

It's right here at:

http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/wp-content/uploads/advpub/2014/6/ehp.1307044.pdf


I must say that I don't find it at all convincing.

First of all, they talk about having a multinomial regression model but they never actually describe it so there is no possibility for an independent expert to have a look and make sure that everything works as they claim.

Second, even if you accept their model as given the results don't look right. To establish their figure of a 60% increase in risk, they list out 126 cells - only 16 of which pass the p < 0.05 level for statistical significance. That means most of their numbers are meaningless, and maybe all of them all are, and I find it deeply disturbing that they do not even mention this huge issue in their discussion.

Lastly, they report that 70% of the autistic children were never exposed to pesticides while 30% were exposed. The percentages are exactly the same for developmentally disabled children, as well as for control children. If it were true that pesticide exposure causes a serious increase in autism risk, such as the 60% claimed in the article, then the fraction of autistic children found in retrospect to have been exposed should have been significantly higher. This fact is the very basis of retrospective studies for isolating the cause of an effect: look to see what the autistic children have in common that is missing from the controls, and try to work backwards to establish a cause. This study fails at the very first step.

...but organophosphates are nasty generally. Organochlorides (particularly DDT) were much safer and environmentally responsible. I know, DDT has a terrible rep but pretty much the whole problem with DDT was over application, like if a gram will work, ten tons will work better. Seriously.

There is enough trouble keeping the professional applicators within the bounds of approved and safe uses, but those suburban lawn & gardeners go hog wild and poison everything with the heaviest of hands.

"Charles Genseal of Madera said he doesn't know if pesticides are a factor in autism. He has a granddaughter, 13, who has Rett syndrome, a form of autism, and she never has lived near a farm."

And I'm sure they don't spray for mosquitos in his town, I'm sure he's (or his daughter's school) never used any chemicals to make the lawn greener, with less dandelions. Ye Gods, there are plenty of other pesticide sources than farms.

They try to use mosquito fish in bodies of water and stuff like that because spraying only kills adults. Good lord, people forget that it's 2014 and every damn thing has a website.

Spraying near her school wouldn't have mattered, unless her mom was rolling around in the flower beds while pregnant. Autism symptoms show up long before school enrollment.

I looked up Madera's policy on pesticide use at schools. Only the most experienced people are allowed to do it and they have to notify everybody within a quarter mile of the school. Farms are also required to notify any nearby schools before spraying and are reminded that that includes private, charter and preschool as well as public K-12 schools.

If you don't read your local cow-town weekly - and many people don't - you don't know squat about when spraying mosquito spraying will happen. Most people are blissfully unaware of when any kind of spraying will happen, or blissfully unconcerned because they figure if it were that toxic to humans, it wouldn't be sprayed in their town.

Only if there's an immediate disease threat (the valley has west nile outbreaks) and they can't manage it otherwise. They focus on distributing mosquitofish and draining standing water.

Look, the pesticide hypothesis is dumb. It doesn't match up with the distribution of the condition in California. Making up 60's levels of mosquito spraying is fallacious: There is Autism So There Must Be Pesticides is not a reasonable argument.

I wish it were that simple, but there's no fucking way it's that simple.

Because I think they're bad for humans and plants for a variety of reasons. We were not meant to live among chemicals. We are made of the same stuff as the pests that are targeted. Do I believe conclusively that pesticide cause autism? I couldn't say. I'm not an expert in the field by any means. Do I believe that pesticides are harmful to human life in ways we're only just now beginning to grasp? Absolutely.

in these days when the quality of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat is also declining at such a rapid pace, it would seem highly likely to me that their is a correlation. But there will always be people who want to deny any causality.

When I was a kid in the 50s it seemed like everyone smoked cigarettes, everywhere you went. Inside grocery stores, restaurants, bars, offices,etc. Studies started coming out linking cancer to cigarettes. Most people, just denied that there might be any link between the two and kept on smoking. This situation is no different.

We just keep shitting in the nest and wondering why it might smell funny.

Is better than being cautious of studies linking poison and health.

And there is a big increase in diabetes with domestic pets as well which made me wonder if the flea/tick treatments which are known to have pesticides in them are responsible for much of the problem (as opposed to environmental factors).

Reuters:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/17/us-more-evidence-links-pesticides-diabet-idUSTRE77G45120110817

systems and causing unusual responses in our nervous and hormonal systems?

...Humanity.

- Yay. We won.

K&R

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